By Kungu Al-mahadi Adam
All is not well for Ugandan money bag Mr. Sudhir Ruparellia, following what now explicitly seems to be an open economic war against him and his investments in the country.
Our investigations have landed us on information allegedly indicating massive fraud in both the takeover of Crane bank(owned by Mr. Sudhir) by Bank of Uganda and its sale to DFCU bank.
First, the Central Bank prematurely declared Crane bank as one that had sunk into liquidation meaning that, it was economically handicapped, which threatened away both the existing and new clients.
However, before the directors had revised their finances to conceptualize and provide a remedy to BOU's claims, the same mother bank hurriedly intervened and took over the bank.
It should be remembered that, all the shareholders were still willing to devise means of vamping out of said 'liquidation'.
The Central Bank didn't even manage this for long. It's alleged that it ran Sudhir's venture for about two months, before selling it out to DFCU, another commercial bank in the country. It's indicated that Crane Bank performed more worse in the two months of BOU management prompting its sale.
Further documents indicate that DFCU bank only paid Ug.shs200 billion to the Central Bank to acquire Crane bank, whose assets were worthy Ug.shs400 billion. One wonders what caused the hurry to demotivate Crane bank customers and also a 'premature' takeover.
Was it a well orchestrated move to frustrate and humiliate the local investors or greed and jealous by a few individuals in the Central Bank?
CONFLICT OF INTEREST
MMAKS advocates, a law firm originally working for Mr Sudhir and Crane bank turned around over unclear circumstances and crossed to the BOU side in the case against their immediate former client Sudhir Ruparellia. These were double standards according to some Shareholders in Crane Bank.
It's further alleged that having worked for Mr. Sudhir for long, lawyers of the same law firm smuggled most of the key company secrets to their new client BOU in this case.
While appearing in the parliamentary committee responsible for statutory corporations and authorities(COSASE), BOU represented by Ms Justine Bagyenda, the director of Supervision commercial Banks, BOU had paid that law firm Ugsh350m for their services but, there are documents alleging payment of 6.5billions.
It's projected that had it not been the hurry and probably the conflict of interest by the Central Bank, Crane bank wouldn't have fallen.
Sudhir, a Ugandan business man estimated to be worthy US1.2 billion dollars is the richest man in East and central Africa according to Forbes Magazine has a lot of investments all over Africa, and employs more than 7,000 Ugandans in his many companies which include Speak Resort Munyonyo, Kabila country club, Kampala parents and many others.
Uganda's taxpayers are likely to lose billions of money in case B.o.U loses the litigation to Mr Sudhir Ruparellia.
It now leaves many questions one of which being whether if the alleged malice, double standards and conflict of interest not curbed, many more investors won't be threatened away.
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